Design and Art Australia Online

professional photographer, worked in Melbourne in 1854-97. He sold photographic apparatus and taught photography at his 5 Collins Street studio where, he advertised in 1856, portraits were produced using the daguerreotype, collodion and paper processes. In April he announced that he was opening at 'the Portrait Rooms formerly occupied by Messrs Duryea and McDonald , 9 Collins-st west’ and would be providing portraits 'on glass by the new collodion process’ – albumen paper prints from glass-plate negatives as well as ambrotypes. He promised that 'an inspection will convince the most sceptical of the superiority of the above process to the Daguerreotype’. Perry’s New Portrait Rooms on 'The Block’ became one of the most fashionable studios in Melbourne for society portraits. A photograph of it in 1860 shows its plate-glass ground floor windows packed with examples of the firm’s work. Perry employed the young Ebenezer Wake Cook for several years as a technical assistant, mainly to colour photographs and paint miniatures. Portraits were still taken at no. 5 and both establishments had for sale in April 1856 'Panoramic Views of the City of Melbourne and Suburbs, taken from the summit of the chimney of the Gas Works’. A paper print of this five-part collodiotype (wet-plate) panorama taken from the gasometer behind Batman’s Hill is owned by the Royal Historical Society of Victoria; another is in a Victorian private collection.

Perry participated in many Melbourne exhibitions. At the 1856 Victorian Exhibition of Art he showed a collection of tinted photographs (daguerreotypes) which were thought 'so life-like and highly finished that I question whether they could be surpassed’ as well as 'a number of sun-pictures taken by what the artist terms the paper process from the material on which they are impressed’ (salted paper prints). At the Victorian Industrial Society’s eighth annual exhibition in 1858 he was awarded a certificate of merit for various glass collodion positive portraits (ambrotypes). He exhibited in the Victorian exhibitions of Fine Arts in 1860-61, receiving a first-class certificate for his single portraits at the latter. His other 1861 exhibit, 'Photographs produced by the Photographic Society of Victoria; [and] Photographic Chemicals’, was also catalogued as the work of the exhibitor but seems more likely to have been a group work. The Photographic Society of Victoria, the first such professional union in the Australian colonies, had been formed in 1860 at Batchelder & O’Neill 's rooms in Collins Street East and presumably Perry was exhibiting on behalf of the members.

In 1863 Browne & Reid showed Perry’s photograph The Naughty Boy at the Ballarat Mechanics Institute Exhibition. At the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition Perry showed plain and coloured portraits taken in his studio at 49 Elizabeth Street (on the corner of Collins Street) where he had moved in about 1863. He received a medal for his tinted photographs, the untouched examples being considered 'too few in number to enable the jurors to form a proper judgement of the Exhibitor’s merits in this respect’. In 1869 he exhibited twelve photographs at the Melbourne Public Library Exhibition.

The La Trobe Library has the best public collection of Perry’s photographs but many examples survive from this long-lived, prolific studio. Cato illustrates his carte-de-visite of Mrs Warrender, the Shakespearian actress, and a portrait of James O’Farrell, taken when O’Farrell was a man about town in Melbourne some years before he attempted to assassinate the Duke of Edinburgh at Clontarf, Sydney, on 12 March 1868 and was hanged. Simon, an Australian Aboriginee [sic] of the Yarra Yarra Tribe Which Opposed the Landing of Batman 1835 is known only in the form of a hand-coloured lithograph executed by William Gould after Perry’s photograph (1860s, National Gallery of Australia [NGA]; Mitchell Library). Ironically, when Perry appeared before the Victorian Parliamentary Committee inquiring into J.W. Osborne 's invention of photolithography in August 1860, he objected to the process on the grounds that it was prejudicial to photographers. He also formed one of the group of photographers – the others being Batchelder and O’Neill, Frith and Crawford – who opposed the granting of a Victorian patent for the sennotype process to Charles Wilson in 1863, on the legally successful grounds that this was just a new name for a process they had all been using for years, normally called an ivorytype.

Perry himself applied for a patent for a new process to stabilise photographs in 1864. Called the Perry-o-type, it was, he claimed, an original 'combination and adaption … [of] the new method of carbon printing recently initiated by Mr Swan of London’. Three years later he was advertising that he had made another important discovery – the 'Abolition of Torture in Photography’ – and was now enabled through 'his researches in the Chemistry of Photography’ to dispense with the head-rest or clam

By 1867 Perry was sharing his premises at 49 Elizabeth Street with J. McKean & S. Gillott, solicitors, and Crouch & Wilson , architects. All the tenants combined forces to present 'a grand display of the electric light’ in honour of the visit of the Duke of Edinburgh in 1867. According to the Argus , 'The batteries were prepared by Mr. G.W. Perry, and the affair passed off most successfully. The light was exhibited from the roof of the house, and, notwithstanding the brilliancy of the other illuminations, the light could be distinctly seen as far as the Treasury on the one hand, and Latrobe-street on the other’.

In 1872 Perry moved to 135 Bourke Street, East Melbourne, calling his new studio The East End Portrait Gallery. Here he offered to print from negatives taken at either of his branches, 'in the Royal Arcade, and at 49 Elizabeth-street’. Cartes-de-visite cost 7s 6d a dozen and he advertised 'Solar Enlargements and other Photographs finished off in Oil or Water Colours’. His claim to be able to provide colour photographs of bank notes was published in the United States ( Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin , June 1874) in an article on 'Photographing Colours, and Forgery’.

Perry’s firm also did some work for the Victorian government, producing a series of telescopic photographs of the moon for the government astronomer, Robert Lewis John Ellery, at the Melbourne Observatory in April 1872. Taken by attaching the special photographic apparatus Ellery had ordered in 1871 to the notorious Thomas Grubb of Dublin telescope – which with its 48-inch (121 cm) reflector remained the largest in the world from its purchase in 1865 until 1908, although not the most efficient – Perry’s 'Thoroughly satisfactory’ photographs were believed to be 'the largest primary pictures of the moon ever taken in the world, being three inches in diameter on the plate used’. Enlarged to 13 inches (33 cm) diameter, they were sent to the chief secretary with the promise of publishing a more perfect set. All may have been taken by an employee, Joseph Turner , for Newton notes that the surviving, widely exhibited photographs of the moon (Mount Stromlo Observatory; NGA) were produced under Ellery’s supervision after Turner became a full-time public servant in 1873.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011